A powerful new partnership:
BioTalent leading the way in life science recruitment
BioTalent has joined forces with The IN Group and Investigo’s existing life sciences team to create a specialist global life sciences division of over 50 experts who are leading the way in the life sciences staffing sector.
“Combining BioTalent’s industry expertise with Investigo’s exceptional life sciences experience, means the outlook in life sciences is an exciting and expanding global industry to be part of.”
Strong investment and growth are forecasted in therapeutic areas, specifically cardiovascular, neuroscience (Alzheimer’s), radio pharma, CNS and obesity. Oncology is the focus of 40% of the global drug pipeline, so continuing to commercialise this during the later stages of clinical trials is a key talent focus.
At the same time, several areas are receiving reduced investment and are forecast to remain in decline. Gene therapy is suffering market pricing and access issues in addition to a lack of track record of success.
Currently, new investment in vaccines is limited.
Big pharma is struggling with an increased reliance on biotech and SMEs to take their product into phase II and phase III clinical trials and, in many cases, commercial trials before being acquired or before considering partnership agreements. Currently, 65% of clinical development activity sits outside the traditional big pharma players.
There’s a continued shift towards outsourced services, with a 9% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) forecast for contract development and manufacturing organisations (CDMOs) and contract research organisations (CROs), including contract labs and outsourced end-to-end supply chains.
Over the next ten years, an average 8% CAGR growth and significant talent shortages are expected in the following areas:
Quality assurance (QA)
Market access
Managed access
Medical communications strategy
Medical affairs
Computational biology
Pharmacovigilance and regulatory affairs are experiencing lower-level growth, and more admin tasks are being replaced by AI, especially post-marketing. Regulatory strategy and labelling are the exception but are forecast to grow at 3-5% CAGR over the next ten years.
There are increasingly complex regulatory requirements post-Brexit, with new US, UK, Swiss and Australian regulatory approval expected. Project Orbis will compete with the European Medicines Agency (EMA), causing complications and tension in the industry.
Regulatory inspections on manufacturing sites are causing the largest bottlenecks in manufacturing capacity, which is being scaled up in response. Outsourced quality, remediation, engineering and supply assurance consultancies are booming, which presents a great opportunity for contractors.
Tech growth has been most prominent in preclinical and discovery, where exciting developments are happening five to ten years before these areas become mainstream and often before regulators and big pharma are comfortable with them.
Demand is shifting from traditional chemists and biologists to those with quant, advanced machine learning, or computational experience. One in ten preclinical and discovery scientists currently have this background, but in ten years’ time, demand is expected to be for nine in ten. This poses a huge talent problem and a lack of experience due to the short time this skill set has existed.
Partnerships are key – no one wants transactional relationships. Seeing talent as the key blocker to growth, small businesses aim to network and meet talented C-suite professionals.
The two new superpowers in life sciences are India and China. A huge proportion of global raw materials go through India at some point in the supply chain; currently, that applies to 92% of the drugs available in the UK (by volume).
Chinese government policy has been to compete and develop their own compounds for the Western world. It’s estimated that China is now ten years ahead of Europe and only ten years behind the US. At the current rate, it will overtake the US and EU as drug development superpowers before the end of 2040.
Biosimilars are an exciting space to be in for volume manufacture. They will replace generics (Alvotech, Wuxi and Lonza are all in this space, for example), but talent is sparse.
The team at BioTalent have had the opportunity to support many pharma companies and, as specialist recruiters, they have the tools, knowledge, and network to deliver more than just talent. The powerful new partnership with The IN Group opens a world of new opportunities. The future looks bright for life science recruitment.
